Updated every Monday, Wednesday and Friday ... and maybe other days too.

Friday, March 21, 2014

Wells Wells Wells

Don't know if you remember this piece. Written a few weeks before Ray's vaststash of plagiarism came to light, it introduced the concept of Raygiarism.

What is Raygiarism? Raygiarism is:

annotating a chess game by borrowing somebody else's notes unacknowledged and wholesale

changing round the phraseology to make it look original at first glance.

But, because you are Ray Keene, it is also:

not bothering to do it thoroughly, such that some original phrases still remain.

The piece was basically about the similarity between the annotations that appeared to a game between Ray and the late Ian Wells in CHESS for July 1980

- notes which were based on Wells' own -

and those which appeared in the same magazine for June 1991, under the name Raymond Keene. This new column, by contrast, made no mention that the notes had originated with Wells.

Even as Ray's little thefts go, this one was a bit out of the ordinary, since the column masqueraded as a tribute to Wells. Paying tribute to a dead man while simultaneously ripping off his notes is a little on the tasteless side.

Anyway, at the time I wrote the piece I didn't know that it wasn't the first time Ray had ripped off these notes. But it is so. Courtesy of a reader, we now know that not long before they appeared in CHESS for June 1991

a very similar set had appeared in the Spectator for 30 March 1991.

Extremely similar, in fact. Right down to the introductions.

Ray ripped off the dead man twice. He scored himself two columns' worth of pay cheques for the same ripped-off piece.

Naturally, not only does neither piece mention where the notes were from, but the readers of CHESS were not told that the same notes had appeared in the Spectator just a few weeks previously.

Presumably the editor of CHESS didn't realise, and wasn't told, that the notes were ripped off. Nor did he realise - and nor was he told - about the Spectator notes. Similarly, I presume the editor of the Spectator didn't realise - and wasn't told - that the notes were ripped off, nor that they were shortly to be recycled in CHESS.

So neither of them could have known about the appearance of the notes in the other's magazine.

I'm sure it wasn't, not least because it does not say so. My assumption is that it was written by BH Wood, who knew that you should acknowledge somebody else's contributions. As of course does Ray, who has never been known to leave his name off anything he had had a hand in, or for that matter much that he has not.